As well-known in the art, a method for recognizing motion, gesture, posture and action of a human body (a human) from an image obtained from a two-dimensional (2D) or three-dimensional (3D) camera has been studied for a long time, and it offers a variety of applications.
A study on posture and action of a human in a two-dimensional image may be mainly applied to indexing, editing and searching of video, and also widely applied to a CCTV monitoring field to recognize an abnormal action pattern such as trespassing, hanging around, assaulting and fainting and generate a warning message.
Since Microsoft has launched Xbox 360 game platform having an inexpensive 3-dimensional camera called Kinect in 2010, a study to estimate a human body posture and recognize a human action from a 3D image obtained from a three-dimensional camera has been actively progressed for recent several years, and its typical application fields may be as follows:
1. Multiplayer game based on motion and posture, recognition information, represented by Xbox avail from Microsoft,
2. Natural user interface based on body part tracking and gesture recognition information,
3. Posture correction system based on motion and posture recognition information,
4. Action pattern analysis system based on motion, posture and object recognition information, and
5. Educational program based on simple action recognition information.
As described above, since the inexpensive 3-dimensional camera came into wide use, it became more easy to extract motion and posture information of the people comparatively close (for example, within 3 meters) to the camera, compared to the past. Accordingly, a variety of application systems are under development and the edutainment field aimed by the present invention is also no exception.
However, all edutainment programs in the art are very simple ones, that estimate whether or not actions occur and postures by tracking positions of user's arm and leg and provide multiplayer contents based on such information. These programs may be considered to be very elementary level in view of educational effect and entertainment quality.